Main         Home  |  CO's Welcome  |  Sea Cadet Corps  |  Our Unit  |  Junior Section  |  Things we get up to
Menu :     Ship's Company  |  Parents  |  Adult recruitment  |  Find Us  |  FAQ  |  British Navies  |  Site map

Adapted from an article in The Times                           Monday 16th January 2006

The world's most technologically advanced exploration ship sets sail today on a mission that may reveal the origin of life on Earth.

The Japanese ship Chikyu intends to drill seven kilometres below the sea bed - more than three times deeper than has been done before. It will then raise to the surface a cylinder 1.5m long and 15 cm wide, which could contain science's first glimpse of a "living" sample of the Earth's mantle (the mantle lies just beneath the Earth's crust and may well contain microbes).

One theory is that life on Earth may have originated from beneath the Earth's crust at temperatures and pressures unknown on land or sea. The energy that started off life may have been geothermal rather than solar.

The Chickyu will also be conducting research into the origin of earthquakes. By sinking sensors beneath the Earth's crust scientists on board want to provide Japan and East Asia with the first effective earthquake prediction system. In addition, samples of the mantle are expected to deliver a rich trove of other information.

The ship cost £350 million to build and will cost another £50 per year of travelling. It will head to the Nankai Trough, where the sea bed is 2.5 kilometres below the surface. Here main tectonic plates overlap and the Earth's crust is relatively thin.

The Japanese project will be the first to reach the entirely unsurveyed environment of the mantle.

The project's chief engineer said, "We will be drilling at possible temperatures of 200C, pressures at which we make industrial diamonds and through rock that even the oil industry has never scratched.

============

Another article adapted from the same edition of The Times

Whereas the article above talks about testing the theory that life originated below the surface of the earth, this article mentions a different theory: that life originated from space.

"We are stardust"

A million wisps of space dust that will illuminate the origins of the solar system and life on Earth were in the hands of scientists last night after the probe that collected them from the tail of a comet made a triumphant landing in the Utah desert.

The Stardust capsule floated to Earth yesterday, ending a six-year journey across almost three billion miles that will help answer some of the most exciting questions in astronomy.

Inside it are up to a million particles collected in January 2004, when Stardust flew through the tail of the Wild 2 comet. Because comets are icy remnants from the dawn of the solar system about 4.5 billion years ago, they are expected to reveal clues as to how stars and planets are formed, and even about the beginnings of life. "Comets are made out of the initial building blocks of our solar system" said Stardust's chief scientist.

The capsule's contents will be removed under sterile conditions, but that is to prevent contamination of the samples rather than as a quarantine measure.

Comets contain the building blocks of life but as they fly through the extreme cold of the outer solar system and carry no liquid water, scientists think it nearly impossible that they could harbour biological material.

According to another scientist, from Imperial College, London: "It is the first time since the Apollo missions that samples of rock have been returned from space to Earth. This thousandth of a gram of dust will probably tel us more about the formation of the solar system than the last 100 years of telescope observations."

     SIMPLY THE BEST - THAT'S THE SEA CADETS !